


those heavy cannon voices (made sin sound so sensual to me)

by dovedimpled



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: M/M, and the other half is hanging out with dead girls, bludgeoning men who look like his boyfran to death, it's still commentary on a relationship even though, norman chapel, one half of it is running around italy, primavera compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-12
Updated: 2015-06-12
Packaged: 2018-04-04 01:51:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4121757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dovedimpled/pseuds/dovedimpled
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will needs her ghost to help him bear the weight.</p>
            </blockquote>





	those heavy cannon voices (made sin sound so sensual to me)

**Author's Note:**

> The title is a line from a poem called "In Gratitude for a Southern Baptist Upbringing" by Ava Leavell Haymon, a poem which celebrates all of the things those sermons couldn't quite stamp out of us. Will's from Louisiana just like Ava and me and I thought he'd be able to empathize. 
> 
> Churches, no matter how ornate, aren't so daunting when you know what it's like hunkered down in a pew sweating in one, especially when you're a child afraid of going to hell. I figured Will has similar memories. 
> 
> Lots of talk about the Book of Job. Not as many thoughts about how wonderful both Will and Abigail are, but that's just a given. Also, watching the episode again I see that the Norman Chapel has chairs, not pews, so I'm going to be forced to claim creative license. Whoops!

Standing in the opulence of a church that belongs more convincingly to a dark rabid creature than a God lit up with purity like badly strung Christmas lights, it occurs to Will that the people he loves the most are made for cold weather. Winter spirits, come to wrench the nests from his trees, damn the birds and their songs. Come to wrench the warmth from his skin until he is barren enough to carry them.

Which is why Abigail comes with him to Palermo. And she reminds him of all the things he won't admit to, the things he isn't sure he feels or doesn't feel--the unflinching loyalty and unwavering devotion and unbelievable faith in Hannibal Lecter. But all the same, he's glad she's with him because he doesn’t want to know he alone feels a skewed intimacy for Hannibal Lecter.

It is unbearably lonely, being the only person alive to know how it feels when a man can split you in two and you can still wake up thinking his name.

“What do you remember best about his house?” Abigail asks him softly, the ways she says everything now, with a little inscrutable smile he has come to recognize as a remnant from her time with Hannibal.

“Hmm,” Will replies with an odd but genuine calm he’s felt for eight months, “The sky outside, when I was coming or going. Stepping into the driveway in November and every evening seeing a different shade of blue. The play of shadow and light caught in a cold blue lens, breathing in the chiaroscuro. And the warmth of his kitchen, his crisp white aprons, the roll of warmth from the oven when he’d open it.”

“That’s nice,” Abigail says sincerely, small smile chipped onto her lips like a crack in a teacup, “I liked his Persian rugs and the empty vases he kept on shelves and tables. They were pretty. And I liked the silence. The way the steps to the basement didn’t make any noise at all.”

A reference to Abigail’s captivity triggers a ripple in his serenity, but not one second of doubt at his decision to come to Sicily.

They fall silent, a ghost and a haunted man. Abigail is a knife between his ribs he occasionally adjusts, to dig it in deeper, and he can’t do without her in one of Hannibal’s most holy and desecrated places. She wears a shirt that emphasizes her swan-like neck, her moon pale throat, her jagged scar like someone took a letter opener to her.

Pale but pretty, with a learned wariness not completely bereft of kindness. That’s what his modest wish for her had been--someone who could’ve had a chance, after the devastation of his and Hannibal’s choices.

Turning from her, his eyes alight on the pews. Certainly they are grander than the modest wooden pews in the church his father had helped the other men in Central, Louisiana, build when he’d been a child. Zoar Baptist was a finely built church of oak and pine, but he’d never dwelt much on its construction when he was eight years old listening to Reverend Grady cast his whip-cracking sermons upon his flock.

The pews here are Old World elegant, as if they washed up smooth and dark and lovely from the depths of some otherworldly ocean, made by deft and unseen hands. The pews in his childhood church were worn and sturdy, solid oak with routed crosses on the outside panels, a righteous stamp on such worldly possessions. Will can imagine haggard Italian faces in the hallowed shadows of the aisles just as he can remember sweating in his starched Sunday clothes, the gathering beads rolling down between his shoulder blades. Everyone listening to The Word. And what wretched words they were.

“What are you smiling at?” Abigail asks, observing him with an open and easy curiosity. Nothing like the curiosity of her in life, coming across sharp and scared and desperate. Coming across cold, trying to hurt him until he revealed what she wanted to know. Now she is decidedly kinder, as if changed by the knowledge of death, the knowledge of death dealers, the knowledge of how fathers cannot help but love her too much to release her from their deadly clutches.

“‘Thine hands have made me and fashioned me together round about; yet thou dost destroy me,’” quotes Will, with a smile that is nearly a trick of light if not for the honest amusement around his eyes.

Abigail tilts her head to one side, just a tick, and asks, “Where’s that from?" “The Book of Job,” Will answers promptly, “Grew up Baptist, couldn’t have escaped Job if I tried. Job couldn’t escape Job either and he did try.”

Abigail merely bites her bottom lip, waiting.

“God made a bet with Satan that a good and faithful man, Job, wouldn’t renounce God no matter what happened to him, be it famine, torture, or the murder of his children. All of these things God allowed Job to experience,” Will tells her, wondering at the exchange of a Sunday sermon for the Sunday hunt in the woods that she must have had instead.

Abigail watches Christ’s painted rendering in the high-ceilinged chapel as if his enigmatic expression might change and asks, “So God wanted to test his faith?”

If Will were the sort of man to allow the closeness and connection he craves, he might reach out and stroke the hair falling over her shoulder. It’s longer than he remembers, but the color is a familiar sooty brown. The color Hannibal might dye his, he thinks, running to Italy or France to start a new life with the reminder of Abigail falling absently into his vision every now and then. What does he do to remind himself of Will?

Will doesn’t touch her hair or voice his theories about Hannibal, doesn’t even reach out, and he considers her question.

“That’s the entitled excuse of an entitled idol,” Will tells her, “God doesn’t just make Job suffer for a day or two. Job’s body is afflicted by sores and painful boils. Hundreds of his animals are uselessly slaughtered and he grows hungry. His children are slain at a dinner party. He hacks off his hair and laments the day he was born. And for what?”

Abigail watches Christ, his apostles, their navy robes whispering across the walls on some holy breeze. She can't answer.

She has to answer. She didn't understand in life, too young to do anything but be overwhelmed by the tides of the devils who loved her. But now she might.

“Abigail,” Will says, wanting her to puzzle it out, “Why do powerful men hurt other people?”

“Because they can?” Abigail responds, half-bitterly and half-soothingly.

“That’s why they _kill_ other people,” he tells her. “Why do they hurt people?”

They hold between them the memory of one man who had the entitlement and the power to take a falling girl and a fallen man and give them the promise of stability, following through on the promise just enough to garner their trust and dependency. And then he took it away, cut himself out of them and left.

Left them cold, hungry, hurt. Birthed them again in blood and let them wail on the floor without him and because of him.

“Why do they hurt people…” Abigail muses, shoving wind-chapped hands into her coat pockets.

They hold between them the blood spattered, swollen eyed face of a god whose utter fallibility welled up in his eyes to spill into his hand to form a blade. And he used it to punish Will with the same conviction with which he would have rewarded him.

They hold between them the tender grip of the hand that guts, the broken look of a beloved, the worthless tears that couldn’t slow the need to break what broke him. A monster bewildered at the existence of a heart wounded with a mighty and vicious sword.

What can a monster or a killer or a god do with his heart when he discovers it as it bleeds, cupped in the palm of another?

Abigail purses ruddy red lips, tells him finally, “They hurt people because they want to see what will happen. How can you fight against that? How can you win?”

They hold between them the soft evening strains of the harpsichord, the indulgent oil paintings of Leda and the Swan and of the Rape of Persephone, discussions on the merits of opera amusedly told to a man fixing a boat motor, having _The Little Prince_ and Proust recommended to Will in the same breath, and Abigail being shown how to toss pizza dough high in the air and catch it.

They hold between them the petty, impassioned anger that slit her throat.

“You can’t,” shrugs Will, then gestures to the pews around them, “The Lord giveth and He taketh away. You can fear something or you can love something, but the best thing you can do is walk into your decisions, with clarity, on your own two feet.”

When he turns to look at her, she’s gone. Like so much dust and air.


End file.
